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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Wells
Contentment
Well
Content
Requires
Perhaps
Playing
Practice
Less
Easy
Violin

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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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